European steel industry reaffirms its
commitment to R&D to reduce CO2 emissions

The European Steel Technology Platform (ESTEP) has
today decided to launch a second phase of the Ultra Low CO2 Steelmaking research
programme. ULCOS-II will be the world’s most ambitious Research and
Development (R&D) effort to reduce process-related
CO2 emissions in steelmaking. The current
ULCOS project brings together steelmakers, companies in the steel supply chain,
research laboratories and universities to devise the breakthrough technologies
that can bring about enhanced reductions in CO2 emissions from steelmaking, with
almost €30m of funding already allocated from the EU's research
programmes, including the Coal and Steel Research Fund (IP/07/1041)
managed by the European Commission. The next phase will require significant
levels of investment – the first industrial-scale demonstration is
estimated at €300 m.

“The European Commission is committed to encouraging industry to
reduce its CO2 emissions and research plays a vital role in that”,
said European Science and Research Commissioner, Janez Potočnik.
“The European Steel Technology Platform and the work of the ULCOS
programme are good examples of an industry working to develop appropriate
technologies to maintain its future competitiveness."

Michel Wurth, chairman of ESTEP’s Steering Committee said
“This important decision shows that the European steel industry is
strongly committed to making its contribution to the fight against climate
change and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, it
demonstrates that it is capable of living up to this responsibility and at the
same time seeking to improve its competitiveness”.

The European steel industry has cut emissions by 50% over the last 40 years.
As carbon-based technologies approach their physical limits with respect to
energy efficiency, the steel industry has decided to invest in long term R&D
to come up with breakthrough technologies to decrease CO2 emissions
in steelmaking even more drastically. It was for this reason that the European
Steel Technology Platform was launched, with the support of the European
Commission, at the beginning of 2003. ULCOS, carried out by a consortium of 48
European partners, is the most important collaborative project implemented under
the umbrella of FP6 and the Research Fund of Coal and Steel (RFCS).

A strategy has been put into place to achieve the challenging objectives of
ULCOS that first validates process concepts and then demonstrates at pilot-scale
the feasibility of the most promising. Four breakthrough "routes", with the
potential to cut emissions by a factor of two or more in the long term have been
selected for further research from a possible 80. Following a study looking
ahead until 2050, the four selected process candidates will be tested. They each
need to be further evaluated in detail with regard to their technological,
process, economical and environmental performance.

The so-called ULCOS-II programme, which was given the go-ahead today by the
Technology platform, will set up several larger scale pilots to test the most
promising medium/long term technologies on an industrial scale. Except when
carbon-lean electricity is massively available, all breakthrough routes will
need to be coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS), a concept which will
have to be adapted cleverly to the particular features of the sector. The first
technology to be evaluated on an industrial scale will be based on the Blast
Furnace technology with Top Gas Recycling (TGR-BF) and CCS.

This research will require considerable investment, with a price tag of about
300m€ for the implementation of the TGR-BF route. The outcome of this
research will be technology for CO2 capture, transport and storage in
steelmaking, thus allowing CO2-free steelmaking for the first time.
This technology will be developed in line with EU objectives on
CO2 capture and storage and its public acceptance. The European Steel
Technology Platform will work closely with the European Zero Emissions
Technology Platform, which is also focusing on research into CO2
capture, transport and storage.

At its meeting, the Steering Committee also gave its strong support to
several other large environmental projects such as scale-free and lean-energy
processes, sustainable use of resources, societal impact of development of new
materials, intelligent manufacturing and energy-efficient buildings, working in
tandem with the European Construction Technological Platform (ECTP)
platform.ESTEP website: